BASIS Charter Schools Reach New Heights in the 2020 U.S. News & World Report Rankings While the 2020 rankings methodology still veers from schools with our network's 'college readiness' goal, nine of our campuses are still ranked in the nation's 99.6th percentile and 5 are in the top 25 STEM schools nationally!

The network of BASIS Charter Schools once again ranked among the best in the nation – both as a network, and among its individual schools which were eligible for this year’s rankings — with a record nine campuses in the top 91 schools in the United States, out of more than 24,000 public schools assessed by U.S. News & World Report.

BASIS Chandler is ranked #7 in the U.S., and is also the #1 charter school in the nation, the #1 school in the state of Arizona, and the #6 STEM school nationally.

Indeed, our network has eight campuses ranked among the nation’s best STEM schools, which looks at student success by school in science, technology, engineering, and math courses. The STEM rankings include three top 10 STEM schools and five top 25 stem campuses.

“We still believe that college readiness is the most vital part of our mission to raise the levels of our students’ learning to the highest international levels,” said BASIS Educational Ventures CEO Dr. Peter Bezanson. “The publication’s STEM rankings are for the second straight year the best pure measure of college readiness. Once again, our schools’ STEM rankings show how true that is.”

All ten BASIS Charter Schools eligible for this year’s US News rankings are in the nation’s 99.1st percentile. Our top nine campuses were ranked in the nation’s 99.6th percentile, or the top 0.38% of American schools.

Among other US News rankings data for the BASIS Charter Schools network:

• National charter school rankings: The BASIS Charter Schools network has the #1 charter school in the nation, 6 of the top 10 charters nationally, and 9 of the top 20 charter schools in the U.S. Read that again: just under half – nine of twenty — of the top twenty charter schools in the United States are BASIS Charter Schools.
• National STEM school rankings: BASIS Charter Schools have eight schools in the US News rankings for the nation’s best STEM schools (science, technology, engineering, and math), including five in the top 25 STEM rankings nationally: #5 BASIS Oro Valley, #6 BASIS Chandler, #8 BASIS Scottsdale, #16 BASIS Tucson North, and #24 Phoenix.
• Arizona rankings: The BASIS Charter Schools network has eight schools in Arizona which were eligible for the US News rankings – and all eight are in Arizona’s top ten: #1 BASIS Chandler, #2 BASIS Oro Valley, #4 BASIS Peoria, #5 BASIS Flagstaff, #6 BASIS Tucson North, #7 BASIS Scottsdale, #8 BASIS Phoenix, and #10 BASIS Ahwatukee.
• Texas rankings: This is the first year that the BASIS Charter Schools network had a campus in the state of Texas that was eligible for the rankings. BASIS San Antonio–Shavano is ranked as the #9 school in the state of Texas – and the only school in Texas’ top ten which is an open-enrollment public school. (The other nine are selective admission.) It is also the #1 school in the city of San Antonio, and the #1 charter school in Texas. The seven-year-old campus (which has had its current name for just three years!) is #91 in the nation, an incredible achievement for a new school in its first year of rankings eligibility.
• Washington, D.C. rankings: BASIS Washington, DC is once again in the top 1% of schools in the United States, ranking #227 nationally. BASIS DC is also the #3 school in Washington, D.C., and the #53 charter school in the entire country.

“Our student performance continues to improve, year after year, and so these rankings aren’t necessarily a sign of precisely what we do, since US News isn’t exclusively focused on college readiness,” said BASIS.ed CEO Aaron Kindel. “But they do show that no matter how you assess BASIS Charter Schools, it is evident that we make students successful.”

This is the second consecutive year that the BASIS Charter Schools network had so many campuses ranking this high despite the fact that U.S News & World Report changed the way it assesses schools and the methodology by which it ranks them. According to US News, its rankings until 2018 were “based solely on college readiness” – which is precisely aligned with what the BASIS Charter School Curriculum does: prepare students for college. Since its rankings in 2019 – and, now, 2020 — US News has written that it implemented a “comprehensive ranking methodology which reflects how well high schools serve all students, not just those planning to go to college.”